Indie Arcade: Coast to Coast

The Indie Arcade, Coast to Coast is an annual event hosted by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and its partners. The Indie Arcade was January 16th, 2016. It featured the 2016 Independent Game selections and a selection of classic arcade machines for an audience of 11,755 visitors at the Smithsonian American Art museum. Follow this link for additional information or to order the guide booklet. Visit the organizer section to learn about the sponsors, organizers and volunteers who made the 2016 event happen.

The event affords creative independent game designers and developers the opportunity to show their work at a 1-day event open to the public. In it's first year 20 independent developers showed their work to an audience of more than 4,000 people. It is the biggest event of its type in the nation's capital - Washington, DC.
The event is supported by:

Albino Lullaby is a horror adventure game that doesn't rely on jump scares or gore. Escape a surreal, psychological nightmare set in a dark and macabre Victorian town that clings to the precipices of underground cliffs. The gamespace dynamically twists and contorts around you in real time, as you unravel an equally twisted narrative. Discover the hidden spaces haunted by 'The Grandchildren' as you uncover clues to understanding just where and what you are. Albino Lullaby is set for initial release on the PC and will be fully VR compatible.

Inspired by the challenge of bringing life to the mundane and mechanical, Axle is a mobile platformer where you play as an exuberant little gear named Axle who maneuvers through various machines, charging them up and restoring the spark of their mechanical life. An innovative spin on platforming, instead of moving right, left, up, and down, you move clockwise and counterclockwise as you roll around other gears, collecting sparks of energy to buy power-ups and avoiding dangerous machinery!
Axle features a hand-painted art style and an original electro-swing soundtrack, creating a unique and vibrant world. Axle's adventure spans across a toy shop, estate, a factory, and more, seamlessly fusing traditional platforming gameplay with innovative, crafted controls and fun flow. Axle is an exciting clockwork adventure for all ages and is currently available on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Kindle Fire.

Breaker Blocks is a tabletop game where players use laser-cut, acrylic tiles to build up their own circuits while simultaneously attempting to sabotage their opponent's. As a project, it was meant to explore the question of, "Can one person design, manufacture, market, and distribute a physical game without any outside help?" As a game, it is an exercise in minimalist, abstract logic, attempting to create a game that requires only a minimum of artistic and thematic elements to be engaging and replayable. To accomplish this, Breaker Blocks utilizes only square tiles with one output tab and up to three inputs, creating a dynamically growing, Cartesian grid as the game plays out. With only two actions per turn, players are presented with a variety of choices but never enough resources to accomplish all of their goals at once. Breaker Blocks is all at once an intense, psychological duel, the satisfying clunk of fitting acrylic pieces together, and the logistical culmination of creating a tabletop experience entirely from a home office.

Burrito Galaxy is a first person adventure game with playground like worlds and a wide range of characters. The game is chapter based and revolves around the story of Guac, a lost pilot, and her adventures in trying to repair her ship. In addition, she must repay the hotel damaged by the crash of her ship. The main interactions the player has with the world is slapping, jumping, and sliding. The game aims to be easy for anyone to play, and quickly learn to do fun moves and master the controls. Rather than fighting enemies, or defeating bosses, the game allows the player to use creatures to move around the course and solve puzzles.

The Choosatron Deluxe Adventure Matrix is a Wi-Fi connected Choose Your Own Adventure®-inspired story printer, blending digital and analogue storytelling. It is designed to be easily assembled by kids into a small interactive fiction game box, and encourage social reading, learning, and play. As you play, you make decisions that affect the outcome of the story printing out on the thermal paper. This results in a paper scroll artifact, representing a linear, personal path through a much larger story. Unlike paperbound books, but much like life, choices cannot be taken back (at least not on that play-through), giving them a weight that prompts critical thinking.
Hidden inside the very analogue exterior is a Wi-Fi chip, making the Choosatron device both a source and destination for much greater possibilities. Stories will be sent to the Choosatron from cross-platform software, and can be shared with others all over the world. The Choosatron is a way to introduce reading material for assisting with literacy, language learning, and even explore reactions to complex interactive situations. Current story content explores interactive science, such as taking the role of a bee in a hive, and historical discovery, such as exploring Pompeii before the disaster hit.
Beyond introducing educational and fun stories in a novel form, the purpose is also to spark imaginations so the reader may become the writer. A writing app that talks directly to the Choosatron will allow editing and exploring the innards of existing stories; subsequently, the creation of new ones that can be sent to the Choosatron and played without a complex technological barrier.

Clash Cup Turbo is a colorful 2-4 player couch multiplayer sports game, focused on crazy fun competition with friends and family. Smack the puck into the opponent's goal in a variety of stylized levels filled with obstacles and traps. Play in arenas in space stations, active volcanoes, crystal caverns, and more. Each character has their own special move to provide a unique playstyle, such as a black hole and a mirror clone technique. Clash Cup Turbo was designed from the ground up to be fun and inclusive for all ages and skill levels, so you can get any group together in front of a TV and have the time of your life!

Color Thief is a third person puzzle game, where players explore abandoned ruins by manipulating color through touch. In the game, color works as an energy source – bringing life to plants, fluidity to water, or activating mechanical objects. The player uses this knowledge to solve puzzles to move forward and learn about the world.
Our goals with Color Thief are to create an atmospheric puzzle game that respects the player by minimizing hand-holding and repetition, tells a story through details in the environment, and builds an engaging experience by following the logical implications of a simple gameplay idea (what if color equaled energy?). We want the player to feel the wonder of a mysterious world and to enjoy the satisfaction of piecing narrative clues together and solving puzzles through logic. As players that often feel outside of gaming's target demographic, we are attempting to create a deep gameplay experience that doesn't rely heavily on typical gaming fare such as numerical rewards and combat.

In the award winning 1983 Hip-Hop Documentary Style Wars, then New York City mayor, Ed Koch is quoted claiming that every train car tagged with graffiti cost the city a million dollars. He also lumped graffiti artists, or bombers/taggers/writers, in the same category as thieves and violent criminals. 30 years later, trains are now encased in advertisements by corporate ad buyouts to sell deodorant or other products. Stickers featuring corporate brands fight for space with stickers for unknown indie groups. Non-profit groups, who see the corporate vandalism as an affront to art created by the unknowns, take to the streets, and to blogs, to wipe out the offending corporate graffiti. The New York City department of sanitation wipes most of it away, either with cheap paint, or by cleaning the walls. The City has been known to destroy legally commissioned murals, as long as it's not by the corporate elite. Corporate Vandals is a large-scale asymmetric multiplayer roleplaying game where players use stickers and markers on wall mounted boards to recreate and tackle the themes brought up by this ongoing struggle.
Corporate Vandals was initially commissioned by the NYU Game Center to debut at their yearly event No Quarter in 2014, where it was crowded the entire night with players pushing, pulling, shoving, tearing, and stickering boards and each other. The game has since gone on to be featured as a part of Indiecade East's Night Games at the Museum of the Moving Image.

Daydream Blue is a virtual reality game that puts a dreamlike valley at your fingertips. Mold the world to play golf, combine rocks and wood into a hatchet to chop down trees, play fetch with your robot buddy, and camp under the stars. In Daydream Blue, you play by a different set of rules: Your house is inside your mailbox, cooked coconuts are crafted into beach balls, and you control time with the clock on your backpack. And with a Multiplayer update coming in December 2015, Daydream Blue can be played together with anyone, anytime, anywhere in the world!
Daydream Blue is the debut title from RalphVR, a virtual reality game studio committed to innovation and immersive gameplay. Daydream Blue won Gold Prize at the 2015 Oculus MobileVR Jam and released Sept. 24 on the Samsung GearVR store as a top-selling app. Current and ongoing updates are introducing new areas, new items, new games and new social features.
So...will you Daydream Blue?

In Dethroned, you will Lie, Steal, Murder, and maybe even Protect a friend or two. We've found that even the most casual of players can discover latent talent in this game. Though be careful, the unlucky can die within minutes . . . you'll need more than piercing intellect to win at this game. End the game and finish the fight, or you'll be wishing you had. Gameplay inspired by classics such as Mafia and Werewolf, we put a twist on the genre by giving players the ability to directly and independently attack others using their limited decks as ammunition. Players are also able to modify and redirect these attacks in the name of supposed teamwork. The game only ends when you want it to, so play all night or for only a few minutes, we hope people enjoying playing it as much as we enjoyed making it. Good Luck!

Rescue exotic space animals in Dr. Spacezoo, a chaotic local co-op twin-stick shoot-em-up packed full of sparkles and glow for 1-4 players.
In 2143, Space Zoos are automated facilities run by a centralized AI created by the good Dr. Spacezoo. Historically, the Space Zoo AI provided excellent care and the utmost comfort for all of the exotic space animals. Recently, an unknown entity corrupted the Space Zoo AI, which started starving the exotic space animals and destroying any visitors.
Your mission is to rescue exotic space animals and escape the Space Zoo before the Space Zoo AI cracks your ship's control software and self-destructs your ship. Your ship's communication signature is coded to look like a sentry bot, but the ruse will not last long.
Dr. Spacezoo is a different take on the traditional twin-stick shoot-em-up game where you simply blow up everything that moves. Instead, in Dr. Spacezoo, you must be careful to save exotic space animals while fighting your way through hostile Space Zoo defenses before the timer expires.
Dr. Spacezoo is currently in early access and is targeting early 2016 for release. More information may be found at DrSpacezoo.com.

eBee is an electronics quilting game, merging the social contexts of quilting bees and board games, the strategic and systems thinking of gaming and electronics, and the tangible nature of electronics and quilting. The project aims to bridge the generational, ethnic and gender gaps in electronics and eTextiles through its incorporation of traditional quilting methods and practices, and accessibility of board games. We envision a future in which families, friends, and communities collaborate to build and play the game, and learn about electronics along the way.
The goal of eBee is to build a circuit from the central hub, or power source, through an island, and back to the power source. The game is played with hexagonal fabric game tiles outfitted with conductive fabric pathways and attached to a game board with conductive velcro. eBee can be played as a two-player, team-based or co-op game. When players create successful circuits, an effect, such as LED lights, is triggered on the island. The game produces rich emergent gameplay and results in the creation of a collaborative, illuminated quilt.

In Fuego, you and an opponent create a tangled Mexican standoff one animal-bandito at a time. And when everyone's got their mark, the bullets fly. You shoot a bank, you get the gold. You shoot a bandito, you steal the gold. Just make sure that when the dust settles, your gang walks away with the bigger haul.
Each minute-long match challenges players to strategically place bandits and quickly identify how the projected shootout will play out. Fuego's design is intended to introduce casual audiences to the appeals of competitive strategy games without requiring players to front-load learning how the game works. For existing fans of strategy games, Fuego offers a compact and convenient experience without sacrificing strategic depth. Learning to play Fuego well is intrinsically intellectual and challenges a player's ability to solve abstract problems and predict their opponent.

Run for your little Sheep life and look dashing doing it! Collect hat boxes and coins, whilst cycling through a myriad of game mechanics, thrown out at a rapid fire pace. With over 30 hats to unlock, we're sure there's something for everyone, in this hilarious and outrageous game.

In Heroes Guard: The Journal, you are a weary and weathered adventurer.
All of your questing and dungeon plundering days are behind you - but that doesn't mean the stories of hardships and triumphs need not live on! You will use this journal to capture some of your greatest feats and failures. You do remember how your life story went... don't you?
At the heart of Heroes Guard: The Journal is a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book many of us enjoyed as a kid! You'll also find strong table-top roleplaying and deck-building elements. You'll make important story decisions, roll dice to test your abilities, collect weapons, magic, and companions to be used in a strategic card game that will reveal the outcome of your most devastating encounters!

Interruption Junction is a silly comedy game created to highlight an uncomfortable social dynamic wherein you, the player, are among a group of acquaintances who are uninterested in anything that you have to say, and vice versa. As a one-button game, you must repeatedly button-mash to speak -- the physical exertion of this action mirrors the emotional exhaustion involved in participating in the conversation. If you do not speak for enough of a length of time, you fade away and disappear; likewise, if you dominate the conversation, the other people in the group themselves disappear. There is no real way to "win" this game, as the conversation that results, which is generated procedurally, is ultimately superficial and meaningless in its actual content. Interruption Junction was created as part of a series of games about awkwardness, and is available to play online at http://squinky.me/interruption.

INVERSUS is a minimalist action-strategy played on a grid of black and white tiles where each player is restricted to either side. Shooting up, down, left or right in the grid flips tiles to the attacker's color. This both creates walls for the defender and opens paths for the attacker because they reside on the inverse colors of the board. Shots are used to open up paths for escape, intercept incoming fire to block, close off enemy paths to trap, and flip the enemy's tile to win. With every action changing the play space, each round evolves into a unique battle field.

Lemma is an immersive first-person parkour game from solo developer Evan Todd. It enables creative building through movement. Spawn structures just by moving through space. Extend platforms, smash through walls, and build new ones, all through parkour moves.
Set in a surreal, physics-driven voxel world that responds to your actions, Lemma's singleplayer storyline unfolds through text messages on an in-game mobile phone.
Although it runs fine on normal displays, this passion project nearly five years in the making is best experienced in VR. The game is now available on Steam.

Mondrian – Abstraction in Beauty is a block breaking game inspired by videogame art history and the limitations on form and function presented by the De Stijl philosophy. With a focus on relaxation and accessibility, Mondrian innovates on an age-old genre by bringing block-breaking into a circle; letting the player control the speed, difficulty, effects, and controls; and including over an hour of acid jazz, trip hop, techno, ambient, and classical music. The game is dynamically generated, making no two levels exactly the same. Mondrian takes on the graphical styles of several historic gaming platforms, including Game Boys and Amber Monochrome DOS Screens; as well as other games including Neverending Nightmares and Children of Liberty, with more being released as downloadable content. Mondrian – Abstraction in Beauty is currently available for Windows on Steam, IndieGameStand, and itch.io.

Mushroom 11 is a game about destruction and growth. Set in a post-human world, players guide a fungus-like organism by killing cells. New cells grow to replace the old allowing the player to split, trim and prune the fungus to solve puzzles and consume creatures. Based on the intelligence of slime molds and some amazing properties of Mycelium, the game addresses cycles of death and growth, walking a line between control and lack thereof, death and life, and a world where while humans won't be salvaged, other life can take a foothold.

Nevermind is a biofeedback-enhanced adventure thriller game that takes you into the dark and twisted world of the subconscious.

Octodad: Dadliest Catch is a game about destruction, deception, and fatherhood. The player controls Octodad, a dapper octopus masquerading as a human, as he goes about his life. Octodad's existence is a constant struggle, as he must master mundane tasks with his unwieldy boneless tentacles while simultaneously keeping his cephalopodan nature a secret from his human family.

Redshift Blueshift is a tournament-ready pong-like 2D shooter in which two pilots fight for glory in their variable paddle ships! Power up your shields, unleash a horde of drones and homing missiles on your opponent and keep the hyper-ball in play! Supports local multiplayer and single player vs AI. Available now on Steam!

Grow. Make friends. Survive together.
In this non-shooting shoot 'em up, you are a single white pixel who can absorb the bodies, abilities, and weapons of every enemy pixel you collect. It's up to you to stay either a small and nimble ship, or turn large and powerful. Just remember: protect your core white pixel, because every mistake could be your last.
Creating a core mechanic around the idea of being able to turn enemies into friends stemmed from Serenity Forge's desire to create games that promote positivity. Pixel Galaxy takes the shoot 'em up genre and turns it on its head by encouraging the player to see enemies as potentially useful allies.

Reflections is a striking real-world adventure game where every action you take has meaningful consequences that radically shape the experience. Using physical interactions with the environment, everything you do can be woven into the narrative. The game's unique color mechanic flushes the black and white environment with color for each meaningful action, illustrating your progress and providing clues to what your future might hold.
The primary goal for Reflections is, essentially, in the name. We wanted to create a game that made the player think about the actions performed in gameplay, rather than simply through branching narrative choices. The real substance of the effect you have on the experience is through play, as the game is constantly evaluating every action you take. Where you go, what you choose to spend time with, and what you DON'T do are actually more important than making a handful of decisions. Every part of the experience matters.
The game's story can branch out in many directions, based on the subtleties of interaction. We wanted players to think about their inherent biases or tendencies, and "reflect" on what they might have done that affected the experience. Just like in real life, there is a surprising amount of significance in the little things, rather than focusing simply on big choices. We wanted the experience to cohesively incorporate all of the player's interaction, rather than just a few key moments. Every aspect of the game, from the gameplay to the audio and visuals, has been crafted to fulfill that goal.

Sharpen your skills: Versus style combat is now a third-person multiplayer! An indie game with AAA graphics, Skara is a dangerous world on the brink of apocalyptic extinction after a cosmic disaster dramatically alters the environment. In this time of the two suns, only the skilled in battle can survive.
Players choose to contribute to the fortunes of a culture in Skara. Each of the five cultures has their own style and skill, which will be customizable based on a player's preferences. Then players enter the arenas to take on each other and the dangerous environment, including boss fights and lethal surprises. The best players' actions will be recorded in the history of Skara, a chance for real players to become protagonists of the unfolding drama.
Designed by a small team of European indie developers, Skara is the realization of a dream to make a multiplayer hack'n'slash with the soul of an RPG.

Slam City Oracles is a local multiplayer, rambunctious, riot grrrl, Katamari-meets-GTA physics game, in which you and a friend slam onto the world around you to try and cause as much chaos as possible. Slam City Oracles is a unique mashup of genres both adorable and destructive, appealing to every adult who's ever had fun in a mosh pit, or wanted to topple a stack of blocks.

Splattershmup: A Game of Art & Motion is a game that explores the intersection of the classic shoot-em-up (or "shmup") arcade game and gesturalized abstraction or "action painting" (a term coined by critic Harold Rosenburg in 1952 and often used to describe the work of American artist Jackson Pollock). It is intended to allow the player to reflect on their in-game actions and strategy through visual record, and to approach the creation of art as an arena of action. Art can thus be created, shared and discussed that comes "from inside the moment" of game-based decision, and that educates players around the concepts of motion, decision, and flow as they relate to Pollock's descriptions of his method.
Splattershmup was produced in residence at the Rochester Institute of Technology's Center for Media, Arts, Games, Interaction, and Creativity (MAGIC) with collaboration from the RIT School of Interactive Games & Media. It is owned and distributed by MAGIC Spell Studios, LLC., and is available on the Windows Store, as downloads for Windows 7/8/10 and MacOS, and online via desktop computers with the Google Chrome browser.

The Town of Light is a first-person psychological thriller adventure set in a former psychiatric hospital based on real events and places. The game has been Greenlit by the Steam community in few weeks and has been awarded in "Story and Storytelling" at the Game Connection in Paris.
The game aims to explore what's really happened inside those wall in the fictional eyes of Renée's, an imaginary 16 years old girl that suffers from mental illness. The adventure starts at present days, near the Asylum. Renèe's voice will guides the player, which will try to find her forgotten and blurred memories through her eyes, her fears and her personal drama whilst exploring an environment full of realistic documents and locations as they were back in time as well as they are today. The Town of Light is a game that want to keep memories of what's happened alive, focusing on mental illness issues that exists in our society. The Town of Light has been developed with Unity game engine for PC, Mac, Linux and will be release in Fall 2015.

Trackoons is an 8-person local multiplayer game, where you play as raccoons facing off in a race in downtown Toronto.
There's a problem, though — you've eaten far too much, your belly is too full, and you're too stuffed to jump! The only thing you can do is to use your joystick and swap positions with the runners adjacent to you and hope maybe they'll hit an obstacle and fall out of the race, leaving you safely in the lead: Winner! Gagnant!
Trackoons was made as part of Dames Making Games' Gym Jam game jam by Andrew Carvalho, Gabby DaRienzo, Robert Peacock, and Yuliya Boublikova, featuring music by Maggie McLean and sound effects by Robby Duguay.

What Hath God Wrought? is a series of short games exploring the cultural and sociological impact of the telegraph in the 19th century. It's played using a custom controller consisting of actual vintage 19th-century telegraph hardware, and features on-screen visuals made entirely of found 19th-century woodcut illustrations.
The project is largely an exploration of the use of props as narrative engagement, and how we can use physical controllers to help encourage role-playing. A few small games have been built for the platform, each exploring a different side of telegraph history and a different aspect of how physical controllers can be used. They range from an interactive fiction piece based on a 19th century romance novel to a twitchy action game about cheating at gambling.
The game shown most regularly is about learning morse code through a Simon Says-esque game. When learning a foreign language, there's a moment where you stop thinking in your native tongue and start thinking in your target language. In the same way, it is designed to get players to stop thinking of morse code as individual dots and dashes and start listening for overall letter shapes. After about five minutes of play, players get to experience the kind of mental shift in abstraction that typically only comes with deep mastery of a subject.

ClusterPuck 99 is a sporty competitive sports game about sports based on athletics! Local multiplayer madness! ClusterPuck 99 is an 8 player sports game built for parties, competition and smack talk! Bash your friends to gain control of the puck and then fight your way through to your opponents goal. Try to score while avoiding spikes and utilizing speed boosts to blast past other players. Compete in intense local multiplayer matches on 30 maps designed to bring out your competitive spirit! Enjoy Single Player Challenge Mode, Instant Replays, Stat Tracking, Customization and a fully featured Level Editor!

Dead Man's Trail is a zombie survival game in the tradition of The Oregon Trail-style games with several modern twists.
The game recreates the drama of modern zombie fiction by making team members core to the player's travel progress. Each have their own job that will help the party along their journey: firearm expert, melee expert, paramedic, mechanic, and others. Losing one will rob you of their abilities, so players must keep them both happy and well, managing their health and morale.
These characters also have abilities that help players loot randomly generated 3D cities for supplies. Players must carefully go into the ruins and get out before the horde arrives or lose their party member.
These features, along with an arsenal of weapons: tactical shotguns, field hockey sticks and katanas, creates a visceral horror experience players will surely remember.

Lost Cave is a 2D side-scrolling puzzle platformer where players must manipulate their view of the world in order to move through it. When moving normally through the world, the environment behaves like a flat 2D world; However, players have the ability to "shift", allowing them to rotate and zoom their perspective on the environment like a 3D world, causing objects in the foreground and background to change size and position. This mechanic allows players to solve a variety of challenging puzzles that force players to think creatively about how their view of a location is effected by their perspective. Lost Cave (originally Cave) was created as part of the 2014 Global Game Jam, an event where game developers gather at different sites around the world to make a game in 48 hours based on a theme announced at the start of the jam. The theme for the year was the phrase "We see the world not as it is, but as we are." This led the team to create a game where the player's view of the world actually changes it. After the game jam, the team has continued to polish and refine the game, planning for a Steam Greenlight release in the near future.

Wait is a response to the chaotic, fast, cacophonous, wonderfully kinetic velocity propelling our popular play. Games which rush us toward an even more invigorating sequel. Games that reflected the seemingly unstoppable force of increasing worth and perpetual pixel flipping. It is a revolt to the run and gun era of not reflecting, but being. An era of seeing only what needs to be seen or what hollers, pronounces or declares its need for attention. Shoot that which gets in your way. Race to the end of the level. Speed toward the next achievement, if only to find more achievements on the other end. Or worse, rush toward an end to find nothing there. No more play, no more game, just the empty longing for more, or the desolate, whimpering, almost lingering question – was there something else?
Wait. Why didn't I wait? Why didn't I stop and listen. What did I miss? What am I missing? What charming little chirp of dissipating joy had I glossed over. Where did it all go? What do I remember? What has worth?
Wait is the 4th game in Critical Gameplay, a collection of 12 games made by a single developer, artist and designer, Lindsay Grace

Get the book! Your guide to the 2015/2016 Indie Arcade event. Inside, you will find screenshots and other artwork for each game, as well as information from the developers themselves on their artistic goals for their work. Includes websites and Twitter handles for the artists and their games. Available for $11 in black and white or $25 for full color on Amazon.com